Enough mediocrity – it’s time for some proper weather!

Bring it on, that’s what I say. Bring on your autumn gales that will bend the trees, ripping leaves from branches, swaying as if directing nature’s traffic.

Let the rains fall in great vertical sheets, so that we can barely see through them. Let if fall on the horizontal too, that notorious Galwegian sideways rain that finds its way under and through your protective clothing.

Let the turloughs rise once more from their seasonal underground retreats, splattering the landscape with a million extra lakes. A quarter of our back garden will disappear under water, and I will stand on the back step, wondering yet again if this year it will creep too close to the house.

Will the apple saplings and four year-old oak tree survive the flood? Well, younger and weaker they survived the last three winters, so I’ll feel less fear this year.

I’ve no idea what Galway’s weather is like today, as I’m off visiting the Snapper’s family in England. This colyoom was written last week, while we were enjoying the calm of the blocking high pressure system that brought dry mild foggy weather.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not in a rush to wish away this season. It feels wonderful to leave the jacket behind early in the morning, when I walk Lady Dog. By February I’ll be dreaming of wearing only a t-shirt on those walks, but after the failure of our summer I’m not in the mood for any more meteorological mediocrity.

Autumn offers us a chance to ease into winter; a contrast between the long days of heat and brief blips of winter daylight, but ever since our cool dry June, there has been little more exciting than summer rain and autumn breezes.

Indeed, the leaves are barely browning on the trees, compared to their English cousins, already flying through the air in rushing flurries of russet and crinkle.

Normally I love this season. Walking the same bog road four or five times a week with Lady Dog, I’m privileged to see the minuscule changes that each plant undergoes.

As she stops to investigate another sniffy locale – in the process revealing to me the homes and highways of our prolific local wildlife, by virtue of trampled grasses running under hedges – I look around me and revel in the tranquility; the whisper of the breeze; the singing of the wind on the metal bars of a gate; the ferns, now collapsing under their own weight as they turn brown, when four months ago I watched the same leaves unfurl in a process that marries green lace doilies with party trumpets.

To  read Charlie's column in full, please see this week's Galway City Tribune.